Portable wireless units (cellphones, smartphones, etc.) are offering the user with easy access to others users via multimedia, text, voice, images or videos. Similarly, the wireless systems interconnect to the Internet to store these components on a server. The camera on these wireless systems have been employed to store and/or send multimedia, photos and video for postings on the web, sharing with other users, or for personal perusal for a later date.
The camera typically shows an image that is focused at a particular depth. The other Plane of Depths (POD) in the Field of View (FOV) are out of focus. This photograph has been the mainstream of images and forms the basis of videos where one image after another is shown in sequence to present a moving image to the viewer or user. The focus of depth set by the photographer or movie producer and the user basically has no input to seeing the image or video at another POD.
Some smart phones provide a camera that captures still pictures or video (movies). Some wireless phones offer only one camera per wireless system typically located on the opposite side of the display screen. A camera can be as simple as a pinhole and image sensor or the pinhole can be replaced with a main lens. However, as the cost of the camera has been decreasing, a second camera has been placed on the same side as the display screen. These two cameras are typically on the reverse sides of the smart phone where the user can switch between the capture of images or video on either side of the smart phone.
Plenoptic cameras offer an ability to take a picture of a setting and refocus the image of the setting to a different POD using the original Light Field Photograph (LFP) image. A plenoptic camera comprises of a microlens array and at least one image sensor array. Each microlens captures all the light in its field of view (FOV) that arrives along the rays entering that particular microlens. The microlenses is placed in an array of 4×4, 6×6, 20×20, etc. Since each microlens is displaced from another in the array, each microlens captures all the light of a slightly different FOV or different viewpoint. Thus, the light striking one region of the microlenses array is different than the light striking another region of the microlenses array. The light information captured by the image sensor array due to a plurality of microlenses can be stored in memory. A computer algorithm can be developed to manipulate the light information retrieved from memory to generate how the image would appear when viewed from a different viewpoint. These different viewpoints can provide images having different POD while still using the original LFP image. The microlenses can be located between a main lens and the image sensor array. Several known software tools based on the computer algorithm, hereinafter called “embedded algorithm”, can be manipulated to alter the POD of the LFP image dynamically without the need to take another LFP image.
The image taken by the plenoptic camera contains all the information for different PODs to be displayed by using the embedded algorithm. Currently, the embedded algorithm provides a slider bar on a display screen for the user to vary the slider to see the different PODs. Instead of using a slider bar, the user may need to enter data to alter the image. In either case, the user must perform a voluntary action in conjunction with the embedded algorithm to get the new image.